💁♂️ Introduction. Here is a business bio. Below you’ll find a personal bio.
“Matt was the Youth Governor of Virginia (2004) and on the Virginia All-State Track Team (2004, '05). He earned his Bachelor’s in philosophy from Harvard (2009), and was Harvard student body VP and President (2007-'09). He wrote for SCOTUSblog.com (2010), was a US State Department Fulbright Scholar and Professor in Argentina (2010-'11), and was a PM on the Facebook Privacy Team (2012-'13). He was a Student Fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession (2012-14). He is a co-founder of Plotly (COO 2012 - 2015) and named to the 40 under 40 for data (2015). He was a Product Manager for Change.org (2015) and launched Water Equity for Water.org (2016). His work has 800+ citations (Senate Judiciary Committee, Yale Law Review, NYT). Since 2017 he has worked for Burning Man Project, where he serves as the Director of Fly Ranch. He applies collective action solutions, open-source approaches, land stewardship, and emergent strategy.”
🌱 Origin. I was born in Charlottesville, VA in 1987 and grew up in Harrisonburg, VA. I was homeschooled in elementary school, went to a religious middle school, and then Harrisonburg High School. My early jobs were on a 2,000 acre farm, as a clown at Partyland, and in a funnel cake food truck. My brother Josh had cancer for two years. He wrote a national bestseller on his and our childhood. It inspired an AppleTV show that won an Emmy (NYT review here). My mom has had Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma since I was ten and is a model of grit and healthy living.
🏫 High school. I was track and soccer team captain, and on VA All State in track twice. I was student body president. I was Youth Governor of Virginia recognized in the U.S. House (see: 150 Cong. Rec. H80). A high school highlight was a three week Spanish immersion at the Virginia Governor’s School. I was the 2005 chair of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. I was homecoming and prom king. I gave the commencement address at Harrisonburg High School a few years after I graduated.
🎓 College was busy. I studied philosophy at Harvard from 2005-09 with a focus on ethics., and cleaned bathrooms as a Dorm Crew Captain (~2.5K hours). I co-organized Harvard’s first day of service. I was Harvard Student Body VP and President. I was the student rep on two committees that changed policies: President’s Committee on Improved University Policing and Administrative Board Review Committee. A delegation I joined met with Chinese government officials and participated in an Olympic flame ceremony (itinerary). As Senator Mark Obenshain’s Legislative Aide I worked on a minor piece of healthcare legislation. After getting a high school history and English certification at the Harvard Graduate School of Education I taught at Cambridge Community Charter School.
📚 Social Contract & the Law. I have an interest in ethics, law, and the social contract. In philosophical questions and style I’ve tried to emulate and build on Tommie Shelby, Selim Berker, Susan Wolf, Kyle Whyte, Tom Goldstein, and David Wilkins. Professor Shelby—Philosophy Professor and African and African American Studies Dept. Chair—advised my honors senior thesis ("Only God Can Judge Me: Codes of Conduct in the Non-Ideal Political Climate of Tupac’s America”). In 2010-11 I worked for Akin Gump’s Supreme Court Practice in DC as a writer for SCOTUSblog.com. My better articles are Imprecise Language & Citizens United Polling and Cameras & the Supreme Court. My time as a Student Fellow in the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession from 2012-14. All my articles are on Google Scholar. These are my favorites
🇪🇺 Europe. After college I backpacked from Turkey to Spain with my best friend Jim. We were students at L’Abri, a Swiss philosophical community. We backpacked, hitchhiked, and visited twelve countries on a $3,000 budget. Overall I’ve now been to 27 countries.
🇦🇷 Argentina. While a US State Department Fulbright Scholar in San Juan, Argentina, I lived in a rural desert, spoke Spanish for a year. The National University of San Juan sponsored my professorship, and while there I published articles on sundials and education(see: Dialing at Chalet De Graffigna, 17 The Compendium 16 (2010) and Argentina’s Long-Suffering Universities, 5 Am. Q. 112 (2011)). I enjoyed friendships focused on soccer, quality of life, good food, dancing, and fun. I felt deep connections, relational and personal beliefs, and ecological concern.
🌈 SF. In 2011 I moved to San Francisco. I worked on the Facebook Privacy Team. I was the third member of the Facebook Product Privacy Team and was the PM for Facebook.com/dyi. I have always used a flip phone.
📈 In 2012 I became interested in how to use open-source collective action to solve problems. The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures were a big influence. I co-founded Plotly and was COO three years. I led product, open-source initiatives, grew the team to forty, & led growth to get to 1M users & $2M ARR. Plotly now gets 20M downloads a month, has 586M total downloads, and has 97K GitHub ⭐. Along with Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, & founders from Lyft, Reddit, & Airbnb, I was selected for the Top 40 Data Mavericks Under 40, the "definitive list of the most interesting & innovative people in data" (2015).
🦸🏻♀️ I think the evolution of data science has given us new 'superpowers' that would have been unimaginable even 20 years ago. We can analyze billions of data points, visualize the microscopic and unseen, and model and predict reality, truth, and nature. Plotly has been part of this revolution, empowering anyone—from students to world-class scientists to the 100% of Fortune 500 companies that use Plotly—with collaborative tools that turn data into insight. Since 2015, Plotly’s Python, R, and JavaScript libraries have been available as open-source and free software so the superpower of data science can be in everyone’s hands. Plotly’s tools have seen what to me feels like shocking adoption:
🎢 Plotly’s libraries have been downloaded 538 million times.
🌟 Plotly’s 205 repositories have a combined 97,000 GitHub stars.
🏅 67,000 GitHub repositories and other projects use Dash in their software.
🚀 Plotly.py gets 20 million downloads a month and is used by 311,000 projects.
🌠 Dash, Plotly.js, and Plotly.py have hundreds of community contributors who contribute their own code to improve the project.
🏆 Plotly was named the top data and AI product of 2024 in a 10,000 person assessment.
👥 I believe in open-source software and methods. Open-source is a proven way to build better products, get more eyeballs to help with bugs, and enable wider contributions, perspectives, and use cases. I think it is in the best interest of society for software to be openly studied and collectively built. Open-source is also way more fun, community-oriented, and inclusive.
🌎 In 2015 I wrote two articles with The White House for the Obama Climate Data Initiative. That project made it clear to me that climate change threatens our survival but could also be a source of transformation. I wanted to work on collective action platforms, and did so as a product manager at Change.org in 2016 and influenced by Rules for Radicals. I launched Change’s membership program, which now has 250K+ recurring contributors.
💧 I consulted for Water.org to build and launch Water Equity, an open source microfinance platform to fund toilets and water. The Water.org fund has raised $460M & reached 6.2M people with clean water & sanitation through 1.2M microloans (95% to women). I’d had a transactional relationship with water but have tried to move towards a spiritual one. I am worried that we’ll run out of potable water ~2040.
🌿 Land is sacred. In 2016 I was a Land Stewardship Apprentice at Green Gulch Zen Center. My stay, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, Tao: The Watercourse Way, The Tao of Physics, and the Tao Te Ching helped me build daily yoga and sitting practices. I build my days around them. In 2016 I saw dozens of colors I didn’t know existed with color blind glasses. I felt connected to a divine being. I have sought interdependent, reciprocal, and kinship-based relationships with people, ecology, land, life, and the universe.
🔥 Burning Man. Since 2017 I’ve worked for Burning Man Project, the non-profit organizer of an 80,000 person desert campout. I am the Director of Fly Ranch. We’ve converted a 5.9 sq mi (3.8K acres) dumping ground into a participant-led art park, community center, healthy ecosystem, and functional ranch. I am a co-author of Burning Man’s 2030 Sustainability Roadmap. Fly is a place to explore my belief in community and ecology. It’s a space where we’re redefining our relationship with land by restoring it. Turning an abandoned junkyard into a thriving art park and oasis has shown me how collective action can breathe life into what was once overlooked. ’m driven by a hope for resilience and possibility.
📖 Land. I grew up on Manahoac land , went to college on Massachusett land, lived on Huarpe land in Argentina, and live on Ramaytush Ohlone land. I work and travel on and through Numu land. I’ve learned from the National Congress of American Indians, Indigenous Women Hike, & Native Land. I contribute to the Yunakin Land Tax. Resources welcome. I’m learning how to relate to this.
🧘 Personal. My daily meal Matt’s Plate is on the menu at Java Supreme. I’m plant-based. I’ve had wonderful experiences with intentional communities, transformative events, therapy, and workshops. In 2016 my decades of crippling back pain ended when I read Healing Back Pain, did a Gokhale workshop, and realized my pain primarily stemmed from unprocessed emotions. I’ve been impacted by Morehouse, Eastern Body, Western Mind, No Bad Parts, Hands of Light, and Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. In general, I’ve moved from universal views to useful preferences and a personal code I get satisfaction from following. It doesn’t seem like a viable moral imperative to come up with universal rules or morals. My aspiration is to try and be humane, loving, grounded.
🤸 Reach out. Feel free to write and say hey, send book recommendations, or tell me about your favorite place in nature to look at colors.